I recently had a conversation with a client about the future of press and how digital magazines and newspapers are the future of the business. When we talked about that I had a few technologies in mind but nothing like Treesaver.

Treesaver is a JavaScript framework for creating magazine-style layouts that dynamically adapt to a wide variety of browsers and devices. Both content and design is shaped with standards-compliant HTML + CSS and no JavaScript programming is required.

It simply searches for the <article> tags and displays the content inside them, makes browsing them possible with prev-next buttons and auto-generates a “contents” menu.

The JavaScript is under 25K gzipped (pretty important for mobile) and works with most modern browsers (degrades gracefully for others).

Besides the HTML5 itself, there are also logos for the features and principles HTML5 is built around like semantics, offline and storage, CSS3 and more.

Other than the logos in multiple formats (including vector), there is an online badge builder provided where you can customize the icons to be used, select its orientation and get an embed code to start using instantly.

This weekend I got the chance to speak about IE8 and the future (the next version IE9) in a different event from the ones I’m used to speak, MediaCampAthens.

MediaCampAthens intends to bring together new media enthusiasts, explorers and professionals to share the current state and their visions for the future of the web, arts, new media, interactive advertising and marketing throughout one day. MediaCampAthens hopes to unlock the potential of new opportunities within the new media industry in Athens. Topics may include – but are not limited to – Web 2.0, entrepreneurship, design, interactive advertising, wi-fi, mobile media, business/marketing perspectives etc.

The event has more likely an open space format in a way that the attendees decide what they want to hear and discuss.

Although the attendees didn’t come from the Microsoft camp (if you get my drift ) they seemed pretty interested, un-bias, and eager to learn how they can promote their sites and services using IE8 features, like web slices, accelerators and Search providers as well as see what’s new on IE9 with the IE 9 platform preview.

For those of you that didn’t get the chance to be there here is my slide deck.

Wow these are great news, I’m going to participate at TechEd Online TechTalk series this year. I’ m going to be interviewed be Giorgio Sardo on how to build an IE8 Web Slice. The official description of the talk is

Are you interested to light up your site on IE8? The MVP Konstantinos Pantos will share his experience building a web slice; we will also talk about some handy tip and trick for building compelling accelerators and visual search providers for Internet Explorer 8.

Just a few days after Microsoft released IE8 Goggle retaliated by releasing their browser, Chrome. After installing it my first impressions are:

Extremely clean and streamlined UI

Nice source view and developer helpers

Nice download manager

Extremely fast page loading

Great JavaScript performance

What’s missing (in my opinion):

Grouped tab browsing

Web Slices

Accelerators

To conclude, I thing IE8 is a more feature complete browser according to my standards and although it’s beta has more rendering problems than chrome has at the moment, I’m sticking to IE as my default browser.

I don’t remember this happening yesterday, but once I’ve started browsing with IE8 today I quickly discovered that I wasn’t able to open links in a new tab or window. Selecting open in new tab from the right-click context menu when clicking on a link caused a new tab to open with the title ‘Connecting…’, in the right tab color (tab grouping feature), but there was no address in the URL bar and the page never loaded while the open Link in New Window wasn’t doing anything at all.

What’s more I noticed that Windows Explorer (not IE) was always opening new folders in new windows even though I’ve had specifically set it to open new folders in the same explorer window.

Arghhh…. after running a few tests, running the browser in no add-on mode, and disabling features one by one I’ve discovered that both problems go away by turning IE8 quick tabs off.

I’ve been following IE beta program since it’s first public release (beta 1) so when I’ve read a few minutes ago that IE8 beta 2 has been released for public testing I’ve download it and installed it. Installation completed without any problems and IE8 was up and running in a few minutes.

Some of IE cool new features that you’ll find in this release are:

InPrivate BrowsingKeeps Internet Explorer 8 from adding any sites you visit to Browsing History.

Web SlicesAllows you to keep up with changes to the sites you care about most. Once you add a Web Slice to IE8, you won’t have to go back to the same website again to get updates.

Accelerators Accelerators let you complete your everyday browsing activities more quickly and even discover new services by mapping, translating, emailing, and more in just a few mouse clicks.

Search SuggestionsAllows you to search smarter with detailed suggestions from your favorite search providers and browsing history and see visual previews and get suggested content topics while you type in the enhanced Instant Search Box.

Smart Screen FilterNew security features help to protect you against deceptive and malicious websites which can compromise your data, privacy, and identity.

Compatibility viewInternet Explorer 8’s built-in Compatibility View button enables you to display websites that were designed for older browsers. Simply press the Compatibility View button if you see display problems on a website like misaligned text, images, or text boxes. It’s located next to the Refresh button on the Address Bar.